Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh Page B

going to end up like my mother.” Shelby’s mother works, for the moment, as a paid companion to a mean paraplegic. She lives in the man’s house, feeds and dresses and takes him to the toilet, tasks complicated by the fact that both are blind drunk most of the day.
    Rich stands behind Shelby’s chair, rubs deeply at her shoulders. She gives a little sigh of pleasure.
    â€œOh, that feels good. I’m taking Olivia off dairy products. I think she’s allergic, like me. It says right here—”
    â€œDo we have to talk about this now?”
    She turns to face him, frowning unattractively. When they first met, her heart-shaped face had a solemn quality, sweetly symmetrical, the delicate profile of a cameo brooch. Over the years she’s acquired a collection of grimaces, lopsided frowns, and puckers. The expressions are unsightly but eloquent, a timid girl’s silent language. His wife’s dominant emotions—irritation, resignation, an outsize disappointment—are written clearly on her face.
    â€œOh, excuse me. Your daughter has been miserable all night. I thought you might be interested. And you know I don’t feel well.”
    He takes a deep breath. “Shelby, there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s been drinking milk her whole life. All kids do.”
    â€œBut it says here—”
    Rich throws up his hands. “You know what? I give up. You’re turning her into an invalid. She’s seven years old. ”
    He takes his beer out the back door and stands a long moment on the deck, staring up at the sky. You know I don’t feel well. He knows, he knows: the migraines and allergies, the menstrual cramps. Forfive days each month Shelby lives on the couch, clutching Olivia in her arms like a doll. My little girl is sensitive, he’s heard Shelby tell her mother. If I’m sick, she feels what I feel.
    The night is silent, the moon glowing almost imperceptibly through the fog. Gingerly he stretches his lower back. He can still smell prison on himself. Usually a shower gets rid of it, but not always. The smell is trapped in his nasal passages. After ten years the place has seeped into him, his skin and hair, his blood and bone.
    He breathes deeply. He built the deck himself last summer, a sturdy platform of engineered wood—the flimsy house’s one attractive feature, better than it deserves. Looking out over his grandfather’s land, sixty acres of fields and rolling pasture, he feels instantly cleaner. The best hours of his boyhood were spent here, fishing the creek, riding the back of Pap’s snowmobile. When Pap died and the farm was divided among the four grandchildren, only Rich loved the place enough to keep it. He imagined living in the old farmhouse with his new wife and future children—four or even five, though Shelby would take some convincing. As a family they’d get the business up and running—dairy cows, like Pap had raised.
    You have an exit strategy, a plan for the future. This is what you tell yourself.
    He borrowed enough to buy out his sisters, who’d moved away and had families to raise and needed the money more than the land. His brother, too, was eager to sell. The smartest Devlin by far, Darren had landed a scholarship to Johns Hopkins, half tuition, though he wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to pay the other half.
    Buy him out, for heaven’s sake! Rich’s mother urged. Darren, the baby, had always been her favorite. He needs the money for school.
    He needs the money for something. Rich didn’t actually know—he only suspected—that Darren had expensive habits. (How quickly and dangerously he could burn through sixty thousand dollars. The high times so much money could buy.) But in the end Rich gave in; Darren got his money and flunked out of Hopkins and didn’t callhome for two years. By then their mother was dead, and it was Dick who paid for Darren’s